Where did it all start?

At Animaker, we have interaction sessions every week with our users. During these sessions, we learn a lot about the hurdles and challenges our users face every day. During the recent interactions, a lot of them asked us questions that were more or less similar to this - “Why am I not getting sufficient views for my YouTube videos?”

To help our users with this problem, we gave them a set of Pro YouTube SEO tips that are followed by YouTube Influencers.

These tips worked like a charm for most of our users!

But when one of our users, Sam Jacobs reached out to us a few months back. He told us that the tricks and tips that we shared during the interaction session didn’t work out that well for him.

Here’s what he told us.

“Even when my video has a quality script, relevant tags, a catchy headline, I am still not able to get enough views for my videos”

This got us intrigued.

So we decided to do some research and dig deep into the YouTube search results.

After analyzing a few thousand results, we started seeing a solid pattern.

One thing that was common among the most viewed videos was that they had really cool Click Worthy Thumbnails.

Every major keyword that we searched for, threw a result where the top video had a very compelling video thumbnail. Below are some examples that solidify the importance of Clickable custom thumbnails.

Keyword: SEO Tutorial

Video with a Clickable thumbnail (435K Views)

Video without a mediocre thumbnail (6.5K views)

Keyword: Fitbit Versa

Video with a Clickable thumbnail (290K views)

Video with a mediocre thumbnail (48K views)

Though this is something even you might have come across on YouTube, chances are that you didn’t realize the true impact they were having on the video’s views. With the recent surge in the number of full-time YouTubers, there are just so many examples available instantly right now.

After finding such convincing results, we then tried to find an easy DIY solution that can be suggested to our user.

But to our luck, there wasn’t even one solution that offered important features like Background burner tool or sticker effect tools which are needed for creating a good thumbnail.

Though this disappointed us, It also ignited a tiny spark that led to the creation of Picmaker.io

Picmaker is loaded with features and templates that can help anyone become a pro at YouTube Thumbnail making.

Here are some of the features available on Picmaker

200,000+ graphic elements

700+ prebuilt templates

Background burning tool

Sticker effect tool

Background filters

Download as PNG option

And what more?

While all good things come at a cost, Picmaker(Beta) is simply free for all our 2 Million users.